


Hey Now

by desperately_human



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Banter, F/M, M/M, Multi, Sam does nothing wrong he's just sweet and wonderful and deserves kindness, Threesome, but also rob being an idiot, but tw mentions of attempted murder of children, magically after Vestal but everything is still okay, no one is actually dead though, rob and cassie being cute together, there's a case but it's not a casefic, this was fun to write i hope its fun to read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:14:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22546123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperately_human/pseuds/desperately_human
Summary: It shouldn’t have felt safe, something so dangerous. Something weighted by our jobs, our histories, out precarious friendship. But it did.Sam's dealing with a rough case and Rob and Cassie try to cheer him up.
Relationships: Cassie Maddox/Rob Ryan, Cassie Maddox/Sam O'Neill, Cassie Maddox/Sam O'Neill/Rob Ryan, Rob Ryan/Sam O'Neill
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	Hey Now

**Author's Note:**

> This story magically takes place in a world where Vestal happened but didn’t go too terribly wrong and Rob and Cassie are still partners and doing okay, but apparently together now.  
> The case that Sam is investigating is ripped wholesale from a side plot in Dervla McTiernan’s The Scholar. The bits here aren’t spoilers for that book, it’s all information we get pretty immediately. I didn't even change the names. Well, I changed some of the names but mostly because I couldn't remember the originals.

‘Cassie fancies you’ Rob said, as casually as handing me a drink. I was over at Cassie’s flat again, trying and failing to forget the case I was working. James Henderson didn’t deny he had been planning to kill the family, his wife and three children—fifteen, eleven, and six—via the network of pipes he had built in the back yard, hooked up to the house’s central heating system and attached to five canisters of carbon monoxide. He wasn’t saying much of anything, and I needed testimony off his wife and son to make sure the bastard was locked up. I had been going at them for days, Lucy Henderson usually on tranquilizers, sleepwalking through her life as she had for years. Sean Henderson, who had told teachers he was afraid of his father, looking at the pages-long lists of precise and impossible to follow rules for household chores and budgets and saying, every kid has chores, as if this was the same as me emptying the dishwasher and taking out the bins once a week. The whole family as good as breathing carbon monoxide for years, clear and odorless and completely incapacitating, and they still weren’t read to testify and save themselves. After attempting all evening, Rob had indeed successfully managed to distract me. 

Cassie choked on a laugh, nearly swallowing her lemon before she got the glass set safely down on a table. The flush in her cheeks could as easily have been from the brief lack of oxygen as embarrassment. 

‘Are you really sure you want to start this, Ryan?’ She raised her eyebrows, half her mouth quirked up in a smile. Rob, leaning back on the sofa, shot her a sharp look and they disappeared for a moment into that eyes-locked, mind-reading thing they did sometimes. They joke at work about how I’m Rob and Cassie’s third wheel, sometimes in gentle jest and sometimes hiding something a lot sharper. I’ve learned to ignore it. The truth is that mostly I don’t mind, the fact that Rob and Cassie have this connection, this shared wavelength that I’ll never quite be on. It’s a bit like me and my siblings, only in our case the connection is built from years of shared experiences, one of us shouting a line from a favorite cartoon we watched as children and the fact that even twenty years later we can all echo it back. For Rob and Cassie it’s something different. I’ve seen enough people lose their loved ones, their partners, people torn apart by mourning and fear and pain, that I cannot bear to believe that God gives us each one single soulmate. But there is something, something about the way our souls are built that draw people together like magnets, so that even when they scream and cry and try to claw each other’s eyes out—and I have seen Rob and Cassie do all of this—they belong together. 

‘Rob thinks you’re cute!’ Cassie broke their eye-lock and sprang to her feet just as Rob dove for her, leaving him sprawled face-first across the couch, still swinging an overstuffed pillow in his hands but with much less enthusiasm. They made such a ridiculous picture that I was already laughing before I fully registered that her words were directed at me. ‘In,’ she gave made a gallant but doomed attempt at Rob’s English accent, “an embarrassingly sincere way.’ And,’ she was grinning, glancing at Rob who was still face-planted on the couch and showed no signs of wanting to move, except to pull the pillow slightly more over his head, ‘ _and_ he thinks you’d probably be a very good kisser but a little shy in bed.’ 

I wasn’t sure how much they were just teasing me: it was probably pretty obvious how I felt about Cassie and though, in our rumor-filled station I tried to keep my glances at Rob to a minimum, clearly they had figure that one out, too. But for the first time in days, I had just spent five minutes not thinking about the Henderson children still trapped in that house waiting frozen for their father to come back. 

‘See if I ever tell you anything again, Maddox!’ Rob had managed to grab one of Cassie’s hands and was biting it while she flicked him on the nose. 

‘That’s going to make your cases a little difficult,’ I said, not so much because it was terribly funny as to show that I was in on the joke, that they could say these things around me and I wasn’t going to get offended, or take them too seriously. Because they couldn’t really be serious, could they?

‘No way, I’ll solve things a lot faster if he keeps his face shut,’ Cassie tossed me a smile as she wrenched her hand free and spun away from another attack. Temporarily defeated, Rob pulled himself upright, looking at me with a definite blush for a second before his eyes cut to Cassie and he stuck his tongue out at her. 

Cassie re-settled herself beside him on the couch, and this I did envy: how casually, easily physical they were with each other, the fake punches and hair pulling, feet on each other’s laps and Cassie stealing Rob’s hot whiskey because she hers was too far away. Growing up we had piled together on the couch like puppies, scuffles in the yard with parents to kiss it better afterward. It was hard adjusting from that to living alone, to remembering that proper adults did not kick each other under the table at meals, even if the man at the next table had clearly ordered escargots without realizing what they were and was now trying to justify his twenty euros by choking down every single one. It wasn’t exactly that I thought Rob and Cassie would push me away, but I found myself suddenly clumsy and self-conscious when I tried to join in, pushing too hard when I knocked Cassie’s feet off the sofa or sitting too tense and still when Rob leaned against my legs as I told a story. 

‘Difficult to explain at the station, though, Rob being totally silent whenever you’re in a room.’ I wasn’t sure if we were still doing the bit, but it was warm and I wanted to draw out the moments we were still laughing, not thinking about the case. 

‘Yeah,’ Rob made a grab for his drink, Cassie jerking it out of the way just in time, ‘they already all think we’re secretly dating. Not sure I want to add Cassie being some kind of dominatrix to the mix.’ I laughed, took too large a gulp of what I realized was Cassie’s drink. _I_ thought Rob and Cassie were secretly dating. Were they not? My confusion must have shown in my face because Cassie took pity on me and added, 

‘To be fair, we _are_ sleeping together.’ 

‘Yeah, _but_ ,’ Rob hastened to clarify, ‘we’re not _dating_.’ Cassie rolled her eyes at me behind Rob’s back, clearly this distinction meant more to him than it did to her.

‘We’re best friends who fuck sometimes.’

‘That,’ the whiskey was hitting me and I couldn’t hold back my surprised laughter, even as Cassie gave me an exhausted headshake, ‘Robert, that’s literally exactly what dating is.’

‘ _No_ ,’ Rob raised a hand to gesture emphatically, ‘it’s not like dating. It’s…I actually _like_ Cassie. As a _person_.’   
Beside him, Cassie was shaking with laughter, and I wondered briefly if this was another trick they were playing on me. Rob’s face was serous, though. 

‘Right,’ I said, as much for Cassie’s amusement as to continue the discussion, ‘I’d hate to be one of the girls you dated before.’

‘Or the guys,’ Cassie added, conspiratorially, ‘our Rob’s broken a lot of hearts in his day.’

‘I don’t break people’s hearts,’ Rob still looked genuinely a little baffled, ‘people get bored with me.’

‘Right,’ Cassie threw me another look, and I found that I quite enjoyed being on her side, ‘and this has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t think dating is about liking someone _as a person_?’

‘Just shut up,’ the irritation in Rob’s voice was cut by the smile he gave her, ‘how did we get started slagging me off? We’re supposed to be cheering up Sam.’

‘Oh believe me, this _is_ cheering.’ It was getting easier, as the night got later and the drink warmed my insides, to get into the rhythm of their conversation. The responsible part of my brain was telling me it was gone midnight and I had a case to tackle in the morning, but it was overwhelmed by the softly-lit comfort of Cassie’s flat and the desire to never go home again. 

‘Right?’ Cassie was grinning, ‘every time I’m having a bad day, I just tell Rob how much he sucks and the world is at rights again.’

‘Jeez,’ Rob stifled a yawn, ‘you must be miserable every day, then.’

‘Well, sometimes I just do it for fun,’ Cassie admitted.

‘Glad to be of help,’ Rob tipped an imaginary hat. I smiled at him, though I felt my mind fading out of the conversation. Sean Henderson had looked up the labels on the canisters, understood exactly what his father planned to pump into their house, and it still took two fights and the pushing of several teacher for him to tell anyone. He would have gone home at the end of the day, and the next, and the next, eaten dinner and gone to bed in that house just like he had been doing for the last fifteen years. 

‘Hey!’ Cassie leaned forward snapped her fingers in front of my face. ‘Don’t disappear on us.’

‘Sorry,’ I shook my head, tried to focus on the hideous pattern of Cassie’s sofa, the now-cold whiskey in my cup. My mind flickered back to carbon monoxide, how it could be everywhere. How we didn’t know anything about the neighbors, what horrible things they might be doing to each other. I shivered. 

‘Sam’s cold,’ Rob said to Cassie, their eyes meeting for a moment before she gave him a decisive nod. He slid sideways on the sofa the sofa, patting the space between him and Cassie as he said to me, ‘come here.’

‘Uh, okay,’ I faltered, caught in the awkwardness that always hit me when I was too close to them, but I was cold and as I sunk into the space at the center of the sofa I could feel comfort in the warmth of their bodies beside me. I leaned back, tilted my head to look at the ceiling, glanced to my left and shared a smile with Cassie. Cassie’s dead parents, Rob’s missing friends, and yet they had built a life for themselves, here in this room, out there in the murder squad, doing what little they could in lives that were already shattered. Maybe it was that easy, could be that easy. Cassie leaned forward, her thumb brushing away a tear that slipped out of the corner of my eye. She left her hand on my cheek, light and warm, a question. I looked into her eyes, I breathed, I didn’t know how to say yes. 

She shifted, the world shifted, and her forehead was pressed to mine, hand wrapping around the back on my neck. Rob’s fingers brushed my back, questioning, and when I leaned back, he slid his arms around my waist, body pressed against me from behind. I dropped on hand to cover Rob’s on my stomach, squeezed tight, reached the other around to Cassie’s back to pull her closer. It shouldn’t have felt safe, something so dangerous. Something weighted by our jobs, our histories, our precarious friendship. But it did. 

The fear and the sorrow didn’t go away when Cassie kissed me, and I tasted lemon and whiskey on her tongue and tears from my own lips. When Rob put his hand on my shoulder to push me back against the couch, open-mouthed kisses with a bit of teeth but sweetness, too. Cassie leaned across me to kiss Rob and I caught my breath as they shared one of those quick, insider smiles. Cassie’s mouth in the crook of my neck and Rob’s warm fingers under the hem of my shirt. I was so blindingly, beautifully, breathlessly not alone. 

Time slipped by, like warm drizzled honey, and I didn’t mind the slowness. That we just kissed for hours, that I could map every inch of their torsos but not more. There would be time, I knew with quiet certainty, for everything else. 

‘I’m gotta get a bigger bed,’ Cassie murmured, as we finally piled, half-asleep, onto her futon. I wanted to hold everything, that slip of her tongue and the fact that Rob had forgotten to take off his socks, gently in my hands forever. 

‘I like you both, you know, as people,’ I said to the ceiling, once we had settled. Cassie snorted, laughter muffled against my chest, and Rob pulled back the hand he had tangled in my hair to give my shoulder a playful shove. I counted the cracks in the plaster, and fell asleep grinning. 


End file.
